In Raqqa, gays now throw jihadis off buildings

Is the story true, or fake news? Funny and poignant if it is, still funny if not.

IRPGF describes itself as “#International #Revolutionary People’s #Guerrilla Forces (#IRPGF) – Smashing the State in #Rojava and Beyond”, some sort of a weird Marxist-anarchist (that combination never ends well – for anarchists) fighting force associated with the Kurds who now form the major (and the only real) anti-ISIS army in Syria. The Kurds, God bless them otherwise, have a significant communist and other assorted leftist strain running through their society, in large part the legacy of the Cold War, when they were shat upon by all their Arab and Turkish neighbours, both secular or religious. With that in mind, the IRPGF is not that bizarre a concept, seeing that a large number of foreigners have been fighting alongside the Kurdish forces over the past few years, not to mention the large military contribution by female Kurdish fighters to the struggle (these feminists don’t whine about micro-aggression).

Mustafa Bali, a spokesperson for the Kurdish-Arab coalition known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), of which the YPG is a major player, said the unit claimed by the western anarchist IRPGF was not part of the force looking to take Raqqa.

“Social Media sites today reported on the formation of a battalion of homosexuals within the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Raqqa,” Bali said in a statement on his Facebook page, as translated by Kurdish news site ARA News.

“We in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), while emphasizing our deep respect for human rights, including the rights of homosexuals, we deny the formation of such a battalion within the framework of our forces and we consider this news to be untrue,” he said. YPG spokesperson Redur Xelil did not respond to a request for comment.

Whatever the truth of the matter, what is far more important is that the Kurds have now captured some 40 per cent of Raqqa, which is the Syrian capital of the ISIS caliphate. Not Assad, not Russians, not anyone else – these are the guys battling the real evil in the Middle East. As I said before, they, more than anyone else in the region but the Jews, finally deserve their own state.